Inspiration: Painted Walls In Domino Magazine

On a whim, we decided to round up three friends and have a painting party on Saturday night. We got our new issue of Domino Magazine in the mail on Friday and decided we were going to help our boyfriend paint his new place. What we learned and more after the jump...

Inspiration for the hallway (pea green).

Inspiration for the dining room (medium to light gray).

We went to Home Depot Saturday afternoon, Domino Magazine in tow. We knew we wanted black for the bedroom (we'll post about that next week). Gray for the dining room and green for the hallway. Because it wasn't our space that we were painting, we didn't agonize over the paint choices. It took us a matter of minutes to narrow down our gray and pea green colors.

In our home, we have never used primer (mainly because the colors we choose are always super light in color). But we took AT's advice and picked up a gallon of white primer and to our amazement, it really made a difference (we almost didn't need a second coat of gray or green).

Before

Always buy more than you think you'll need. We didn't pick up enough Frog tape to finish the bedroom (sigh) and we could have used double the drop cloths (we only had 3 plastic drop cloths).

Once you're done painting, pull the frog tape off (even if the paint is still wet). Because Frog tape has more adhesive than the regular painter's tape, the paint will come off with the tape if you wait until the paint has fully dried.

Put the animals away. We learned this the hard way after our boyfriends' dog and 2 cats walked right through a puddle of paint.

Remember to grab your paint swatches. We would love to tell you the names of our paint colors (Behr brand) but we ran out the store without grabbing them.

After

We were quite pleased with how the paint turned out. While our color choices are a hint lighter than those in the magazine, they were a great source of inspiration for us.